This story was written by Keith Dawson for the Industry Standard's Media Grok email newsletter. It is archived here for informational purposes only because The Standard's site is no more. This material is Copyright 1999-2001 by Standard Media.

Like the hacker attacks that have slowed major Web sites to a crawl over the last three days, saturation news coverage of the attacks is clogging all the major news outlets. Surely it constitutes "secondhand denial-of-service" when hacker news crowds other coverage off of front pages and business pages. Witness:

- The New York Times ran one story on the front page - front top left, above the fold - while another fronted the Business section.

- The Wall Street Journal placed four stories on the cover of Marketplace, and one fronting Money & Investing.

Here are the bases almost everyone touched today in covering the denial-of-service attacks:

* FBI launches probe, says it has no leads. * Experts say attacks arelikely to continue. * Attacked sites are beefing up their defenses. * There is no real defense. * Sites not yet attacked are quaking in their boot files.* The responsible hackers are keeping mum.

Wired News' Declan McCullagh scored with the best two-sentence explanation of why the DoS attacks are proving nearly impossible to trace: "These sorts of electronic broadsides typically involve scores of machines that have been hacked into and turned into unwitting launching pads for attacks on the targeted company. If a malicious hacker is clever enough, ... an investigation might reveal only that the attack originated at an anonymous dialup account."

Wired News' Joanna Glasner and Joseph B. Treaster of the Times both probed a little-discussed corner of e-business: insurance policies covering hacker damage, including revenue loss from DoS attacks. Both reporters noted that hot Net companies are reluctant to say whether or not they carry such coverage, but Glasner dug into SEC filings to report that Yahoo (YHOO) and Buy.com have stated publicly that they do not.

While most reporters contented themselves with quoting experts on the futility of defending against attacks that could have been launched by a 15-year-old, a few writers dug for deeper grokking of the problem and its eventual solution.

Both the Times and Wired News found the nearly ideal technical expert to comment on the DoS attacks and how they might be mastered. Paul Vixie, senior VP at the network service provider that supplies bandwidth to the recently targeted eBay (EBAY), told the Times' Matt Richtel and Joel Brinkley: "This level of alertness is not sustainable. We are hoping that there will be a technological or legal solution so we can go back to building our network rather than defending against attacks." And Wired News' Chris Oakes quoted Vixie on what a technical fix for DoS attacks would look like: "The fix needs to be applied ... at the access side where the source addresses are being spoofed - and also at all of the various insecure hosts that are owned by the bad guys and are being used as distribution points." - Keith Dawson